the 1790s consisted of about 14 percent nobles, clerics, and elite, 15 percent
townsmen, 4 percent soldiers (as opposed to St. Petersburg’s 20 percent), 1 percent
foreigners, and the remaining 65 percent peasants and other taxpayers. Not only
the trade hub of the empire in the eighteenth century, culturally the city’s elite
considered itself the traditional heart of Russia, a sense of identity that would only
grow with romanticism and national feeling in the early decades of the next
century. Moscow had, as Martin points out, far more clergy than soldiers as well
as Russia’s only university (founded 1755), and was the publication site of almost
40 percent of Russia’s books. The weekly newspaperMoskovskie vedomostiappeared
from 1756. The city also boasted a small but glittering noble elite in the eighteenth
century, noted not only for their urban palaces but for their suburban estates.
St. Petersburg’s ring of royal suburban palaces was paralleled by the density of palatial
noble estates around Moscow. The Sheremetevs enjoyed at least two exquisite
suburban residences: Kuskovo featured an artificial lake (see Figure 13.7), a grotto
and orangerie, formal gardens, and a neoclassical palace in wood constructed to
appear as stone; equally palatial Ostankino was home to their renowned serf theater.
The Golitsyns developed Arkhangelskoe in collonaded Palladian style; the Saltykov
family built a classical estate at Marfino, reconstructed after destruction in 1812
in the Neo-Gothic. Moscow province in the eighteenth century was studded with
such gems.
Nothing could match St. Petersburg, however, in opulence in the eighteenth
century, simply due to the imperial court. The city was renowned as a model of
urban planning, called later by Fedor Dostoevsky the“most intentional city.”
Created by Peter I in 1703 on Swedish land in the midst of war, Peter designed
it to embody the rational, practical, and European values he so desired for Russia.
His architect Jean-Baptiste Le Blond designed St. Petersburg with straight, radial
boulevards, grids of neighborhood streets, and prescribed styles for masonry homes.
Neat, rational city plans drawn up by Peter I’s architects, however, disguise the
complexity of the urban conglomerate that developed here over the century.
By the end of the eighteenth century St. Petersburg was one of the empire’s
largest cities, in population and size. Already a sprawling 20 square km in the
1750s, by the 1790s the city had expanded to incorporate what had been suburbs.
As George Munro remarks, the city center stretched 8 km wide in all directions and
its circumference was nearly 26 km. Its population rose from around 100,000 to
about a quarter million in 1796, by which time a quarter were peasants. They, as in
Moscow, worked in factories, shipyards, and workshops, labored on construction
and at the ports, were domestic servants, or hawked merchandise in open air
markets. St. Petersburg’s social composition was more varied than Moscow’s:
military men (and often their families) constituted a steady quarter of the popula-
tion, the Guards regiments barracked near Mars Field and the rank andfile garrison
barracked at the Peter Paul Fortress or billeted in the city. The third most populous
group in the city wereraznochintsy, who served in state offices, taught at schools,
carried out research in academies, and worked as artisans and merchants. Officially
registered merchants and artisans constituted about 19 percent of the population;
another 13 percent were domestic servants. Nobles were 6.5 percent of the
388 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801